White House gossip

CHAPTER I

ADMINISTRATION OF ANDREW JOHNSON

April 15, 1865, to March 4, 1869

LATE April and early May of 1865 brought none of the usual springtime joys to Washington, the Capital City; its residents, in common with the rest of the nation, were shaken with grief over the death of President Lincoln. Public buildings and private houses hid behind dismal swathings of crêpe, and the people were still subdued with the harrowing incidents that had their beginning on the terrible night of April 14th. Previous sectional opinions were set aside in the general regret over the loss of the gaunt, kindly man whom the troubled, disrupted country had learned to trust. The tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, with the simultaneous attack upon Secretary of State William Seward, was the hourly topic of conversation.

Search for the conspirators had begun, and suspicion, fear, and suspense hung like a pall over the land. Peace and security were gone. None knew when or where the relentless arm of the law would pounce upon another suspect. Innocent and guilty alike went through the gruelling. Especially did the fear of Northern soldier vengeance lie heavily upon Southern hearts already bowed in the sorrow of defeat.

Andrew Johnson, the Union Democrat, the “Tailor from Tennessee”—“The Knight of the Shears and Goose,” as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had so often dubbed President Lincoln’s running mate—had stepped into the presidential shoes and was handling the reins of government with dominant force and decision. Punishment radiated from every fibre of his being. As he turned from the bier of his slain chief, two paramount purposes were definite in his mind: to follow Lincoln’s policies, and to punish those guilty of his death. He could think of the tragedy in no other terms but those that spelled treason in its blackest form, especially as, upon every hand, because of the attack upon Seward, he found public sentiment committed to the belief that a general conspiracy had been formed in the South for the purpose of exterminating the entire Lincoln Cabinet, together with himself as Vice President, and also General Grant.

From the hour he took the presidential oath and established his offices in the Treasury building, the demands for vengeance poured in upon him from every side.

At the moment, the surrender of all of the Southern arms was incomplete, and a vast Northern army, two hundred thousand strong, chafing at restraint, was ready at a word to take the matter of avenging the death of “Father Abraham” into its own hands and thus renew the bloody conflict. Never had a man stepped into the Presidency under such difficult and soul-trying conditions, or been confronted with greater tasks, more exacting demands, or more serious responsibilities. Never had there been such urgent need for a calm, judicial, well-balanced mind, able to rise above partisan bias, poised to hold firmly to the ability to see both sides of each problem and to refrain from impetuous action.

A nation torn asunder through an internal upheaval had to be brought together and welded into one again.

Although Andrew Johnson had spent thirty years in public service, fighting for what he conceived to be right, his experience had not been of the type to furnish the subtle diplomacy or suave poise needed to handle successfully the great problems that now confronted him. It is doubtful if any man who participated in the political contests of that period, even the great, wise Lincoln, could have brought harmony out of the hysteria and chaos that prevailed in the nation on the morning of April 15, 1865.

Following his induction into office and his inaugural address, Johnson called his first Cabinet meeting at twelve o’clock on April 15th, at which two important measures were decided. These were the arrangements for the funeral of Mr. Lincoln and the appointment of Mr. W. Hunter as temporary Secretary of State pending the recovery of Secretary Seward. At this time the new President requested the members of the Cabinet to retain their portfolios.

In his first proclamation President Johnson expressed his horror of the crime and his resolve to punish the guilty participants. This document also offered rewards for the arrest of those believed to be implicated—one hundred thousand dollars for Jefferson Davis; twenty-five thousand dollars each for Clement C. Clay, Jacob Thompson, George N. Sanders, and Beverly Tucker; and ten thousand dollars for William C. Cleary, late clerk of Clement C. Clay.

It might be stated here that, despite the most exhaustive efforts, not the slightest evidence was produced to connect any of the Southern leaders with the crime of Booth. Jefferson Davis was captured May 10, 1865, at Irwinsville, Wilkinson County, Ga., and sent to Fortress Monroe. Although indicted for treason against the United States in the Federal Court for the District of Virginia, he was finally admitted to bail, one of his bondsmen being Horace Greeley, the abolitionist leader of the North, and released without trial.

Colonel Lafayette Baker, Chief of Secret Service, was out of Washington the night of the tragedy. On his return, he at once applied himself to the task of capturing Booth, Herold, and all others suspected by Secretary of War Stanton, for the apprehension of whom the latter had offered liberal rewards in a proclamation issued immediately following the tragedy. The Stanton proclamation stated that $50,000 would be paid by the War Department for the apprehension of the murderers of the late President. All persons were warned against harbouring or aiding them in any way on pain of being treated by the government as accomplices in the plot.

The City of Washington also offered a reward of $20,000 for the arrest of the assassin and his associates implicated in the crime.

These rewards stirred up extra zeal, and the army of searchers grew steadily.

The search for Booth through the swamps and the final scenes of his capture and death were most graphically told by George Alfred Townsend, a newspaper correspondent, in the New York World during that eventful period. “Gath,” as he was familiarly known, gathered his daily reports from the most reliable sources. Those bearing upon Booth’s wild act he later assembled in booklet form and published in 1865. From it this picture of Booth’s final stand is copied.

The assassin had been traced to the Garrett home on the Rappahannock, some distance from Bowling Green, by the little force sent out by Colonel Lafayette Baker, Chief of the Secret Service, with instructions not to return till they had their man. The company was in charge of Colonel Baker’s former Lieutenant Colonel, E. J. Conger, and of his cousin, Lieutenant L. B. Baker. At two o’clock, early morning, they approached the house.

Gossip and rumour have played fast and loose with the life and death of Booth, and statements and evidence have been plentiful disputing the fact that Booth was the man killed in the Garrett barn. Plausible theories have been advanced as to his escape, due to the secrecy imposed by Colonel Baker in the interment of the body. The corpse really was interred beneath the floor of one of the cells in the penitentiary in the Arsenal grounds, and not committed to the river, as some believed. Later, the Booth family were permitted to remove the body to their own burial plot in Maryland.

Doubtless, to the end of time in American history, the question of Booth’s death, like that of the fate of the Dauphin of France, will inspire tales of romance and adventure for the pen of the imaginative writer.

However, he was proved dead to the satisfaction of those empowered to apprehend him, and to the satisfaction of those most vitally interested in the punishment of the murderer, and all further search for Booth was abandoned. Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of the President, who was on General Grant’s staff at the time of the tragedy, gave a statement in his eighty-second year to the effect that he had never doubted that Booth met his death in the Garrett barn; that the evidence produced at the time was sufficiently conclusive, and that the numerous stories of the escape of the assassin were merely fabrications created for sensation.

From the diary of Booth, discovered on his body after his death, the whole scheme of the actor was disclosed. The repeated failure of a plan to kidnap the President while he was driving or walking about the city, and take him by force to Richmond and keep him there as a hostage for the release of a large group of Confederate prisoners, was the reason that brought Booth finally to the point of planning assassination.

This diary was not produced at the trial of the conspirators, nor did it receive publication in the newspapers until President Johnson ordered a certified copy of it sent to him two years later. Then, on Wednesday, May 22, 1867, the National Republican printed a certified copy of it together with the facts connected with its capture.

As the Capital City was still under military rule, a military commission was appointed to meet at Washington, D. C., on May 8, 1865, for the trial of the conspirators and other persons implicated in the murder of the late President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Hon. William E. Seward, Secretary of State.

Throngs gathered about the Court (sitting then in the Penitentiary at the Arsenal) daily eager to view the spectacle of the prisoners, hooded and in irons. Mrs. Surratt was manacled like the men, according to the account given by Ben Perley Poore.

The Court finished its task on June 30, 1865, and a full report of its findings was ordered to be submitted to the President. On July 5th, the President approved the report and ordered the executions of Mrs. Surratt, David E. Herold, George A. Atzerodt, and Lewis Payne to take place at once. On July 7th, these sentences were carried out. The others implicated, Samuel Arnold, Edward Spangler, Samuel Mudd, and Michael O’Laughlin, were sent to the military prison at Dry Tortugas.

In Mrs. Surratt’s case, every effort made by her daughter and her father confessor, as well as a group of prominent men and women who sought to intercede in her behalf, met with complete failure. Although the daughter knelt upon the White House steps for hours beseeching a hearing by the President, Mrs. Johnson, and even Mrs. Patterson, admission was denied to her and all others on the same mission.

The recommendation for clemency for Mrs. Surratt, making her sentence one of life imprisonment instead of execution, because of her age and sex, was signed by all members of the Court except General Lew Wallace, A. P. Howe, Colonel R. Clennin, and T. M. Harris. This paper was prepared, signed, and given to Judge Holt to be handed to the President with the findings of the Court.

President Johnson declared this petition never reached him, and the supposition is that it was either blocked or mislaid accidentally or intentionally in the War Department.

Great was the furore stirred up in legal circles over this trial, and dissenting opinion was freely expressed. Judge Andrew Wiley, of the District Supreme Court, known as one of the strongest characters on the bench, did not concur in the plans for a military trial for the conspirators. He arose early on the morning of the execution day to sign a writ of habeas corpus for the release of Mrs. Surratt. Judge Wiley, a devoted friend of Abraham Lincoln, having received his appointment to the bench from him, believed that the legality of Mrs. Surratt’s conviction by court martial should be determined by a civil court. He concurred in the effort to secure a stay of execution by signing the writ of habeas corpus, directing General Hancock to produce her in court. The writ was served, but General Hancock did not obey it. Judge Wiley’s scathing rebuke to the military authorities for thus ignoring and overriding the civil powers is one of the most notable in the annals of court history.

During the short period of the trial, from May 8th to June 30th, 403 witnesses were subpœnaed, 247 examined for the prosecution, 236 for the defense, 4,300 pages of legal copy testimony taken, with an additional 700 pages of arguments.

John Surratt, whose intimate association with Booth led to his mother’s being implicated, escaped to Canada and for two years evaded capture. Finally, he was apprehended, but owing to the odium that had followed the Military Commission, he had a civil court trial. This grew into such a bitter controversy over the execution of his mother that it became more of a trial of a former court than of himself, and through the failure of the jury to agree he was released.

The first great task of President Johnson was the disbandment of the army. As a fitting climax to their four years of terrible struggle and hardship, President Lincoln had planned the Grand Review in Washington for May 23 and 24, 1865. To completing the preparations for this notable event, the President and Secretary Stanton devoted much attention, keenly aware of the impression which the assembly of the nation’s armed force would make upon the minds of foreign representatives and of its influence upon the general public.

As the time for the pageant drew near, there came a lifting of the gloom that had enveloped the capital, still a tented city surrounded on a circuit of thirty-seven miles by a ring of sixty-eight armed forts, with their encircling watch fires—a picture that had inspired Julia Ward Howe to write the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Public squares were still occupied by camps, and all available structures, converted into hospitals, were filled to overflowing with wounded soldiers.

Washington’s streets were notorious for their clouds of dust or wallows of sticky mud. As the dust prevailed at this period, the services of the Fire Department were necessary on both mornings to sprinkle the line of march to make the passing of the procession fairly comfortable for marchers and onlookers. Patrols guarded the intersections.

Upon the grassy hillsides and steps of the Capitol were massed the city’s school children in gala dress, with wreaths, flags, and bouquets, ready to greet the conquering hosts with patriotic songs. Four gaily decorated reviewing stands were erected in front of the White House for officials and celebrities. With the President were the members of the Cabinet and General U. S. Grant. Every window, roof, and tree presented its full limit of spectators while every foot of standing room along the entire line of march was filled with enthusiastic people.

With military promptness, on each morning at 9 o’clock, the great divisions of the army began their movement down Capitol Hill. The Army of the Potomac, with General George A. Meade commanding, occupied the entire day on Tuesday in passing in review, while Sherman’s army, with its two wings—the Army of Tennessee commanded by Major General John A. Logan, affectionately called “Black Jack” by his men because of his swarthy complexion, and the Army of Georgia, in command of Major General Henry D. Slocum—kept a weary audience shouting applause until dark on Wednesday. Before the columns started, the young women and girls of the city decked officers, men, horses, cannon, and guns with floral wreaths, garlands, and bouquets, and as each officer passed, he received a special ovation.

Brevet Major General George M. Custer, in command of the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, was a picturesque figure, mounted upon a handsome stallion, his long hair reaching to his shoulders. Just as the procession turned into Pennsylvania Avenue from Fifteenth Street, the onlookers were horrified to see his horse rear and wildly dash up the street. The General’s hat flew off, and everyone expected to see him pitched to the ground and killed. But fears were turned to shouts of admiration at his horsemanship when he suddenly quieted the horse, turned, and rode back to his place, picking up his hat as easily as if he had planned the performance. In fact, such a charge was made. Every man in his contingent wore the Custer tie, a red scarf around the neck and extending almost to the belt.

A slowly increasing roar of applause greeted the coming of Sherman and Major General Oliver O. Howard, whose empty sleeve was an eloquent testimony of his service. These two rode a little in advance—horses flower decked and wreathed—and after they passed the reviewing stand, they too dismounted and joined the receiving party.

Spectators and marchers alike thrilled over the battle-torn flags that brought forth such storms of applause as they appeared. One flag alone drew every eye but no applause. It hung from the portico of the Treasury building—the flag of the Treasury Guard Regiment—a flag never to be forgotten. The lower portion was torn and jagged, not by bullet or shell, but by the spur on the boot of Booth the assassin, when he had jumped from the presidential box to the stage in Ford’s Theatre.

No military pageant in the history of the world had ever surpassed or equalled this review in size or character. The four years of constant conflict with a foe equally fine in every respect as themselves had battered, trained, and polished the raw recruits of the North, who had responded so quickly to President Lincoln’s call for volunteers, into the finest military organization in the world, unmatched anywhere save by their Confederate antagonists, also trained in the same rigorous school of experience.

From early morning until dark, on each day, eighty thousand bronzed patriots, in a column reaching from curb to curb, tramped up Pennsylvania Avenue to the triumphant music of their bands. Powerful, grim, relentless, they typified the rigours of war. Upon them still was the atmosphere of the conquest of half a continent reflected in their resolute faces and their worn clothes. No dress-parade soldiers were these. They were men who had witnessed and experienced every phase of the terrible game of war and had paid its heavy toll in wounds and hardship. None needed to scan the ragged emblems they carried so proudly to know that they had met and sustained the shock of combat. Veterans of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and the final glory of Appomattox; veterans of Donelson, Belmont, Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Stone River, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Mission Ridge, Atlanta, Savannah, the Carolinas, Bentonville, and scores upon scores of other places. Behind them, upon these and many other blood-dyed fields, they had left another host, a silent army whose mangled bodies had consecrated the cause for which they and Abraham Lincoln had fallen.

Following this majestic and awe-inspiring pageant came the queerest collection of flotsam and jetsam ever gathered together—the “Bummers.” These were the stragglers that had attached themselves to the various corps, odd assortments of humans, animals, loot and salvage, hangers-on of Sherman’s March to the Sea, drift-wood clinging to the only anchorage that promised food and safety. They furnished the oddest parade ever seen in Washington before or since. Mules, goats, asses, horses, dogs, sheep, pigs, colts, raccoons, chickens, cats, and Negroes all ambling along contentedly as though their only object in life was to follow the army—as, indeed, it was. Each beast of burden was loaded to its carrying capacity with the odds and ends of camp luggage, equipment, and the queer lot of junk the soldiers had gathered “to carry home some day”—tents, knapsacks, hampers, sacks, bundles of clothing, boxes, valises, blankets, pots, kettles, fiddles, bird cages, camp stools, a few stray cradles, plenty of pickaninnies, and here and there, presiding over the lot, a black woman. Realism thus painted a living picture of the vicissitudes of the long weary march of destruction through the forests, swamps, plantations, and towns that came within the path of the blue-clad torrent which had swept all before it.

In this epochal review were numbers of distinguished officers: Merritt, Macy, Benham, Griffin, Humphreys, Davies, Devin, Patrick, Woods, Carey, Hunter, Hancock, Ross, Blair, Ward, Smith, Nagle, Geary, and others, too many to enumerate with any degree of accuracy—names a grateful nation has since placed high upon the honour roll in her Memorial Hall of Fame.

Most deservedly interesting of them all was the quiet, diffident man, with the three stars in his shoulder straps, the idolized commander of all of the armies of the North during the last year of the war—Ulysses S. Grant, whom Lincoln had chosen to bring peace to a sorely stricken land. A silent and unassuming observer, he seemed entirely unconscious that through his persistent and efficient service the Stars and Stripes were floating over a reunited nation.

A tanner’s clerk with a series of mercantile failures behind him when the guns of Sumter opened the war, he was the honoured and loved commander of half a million veterans, with the faith and trust of a nation when it closed—the leader of the greatest army from every standpoint that any man had ever had subject to his call.

Inarticulate in public, modest and silent by nature, General Grant’s pride and elation in the day’s event were manifest in the concentrated attention he gave to the passing marchers. His popularity demanded his almost constant response to the ovations to himself.

During the four years of the war for the preservation of the Union, there had been more than twenty-four hundred engagements of greater or lesser importance. In all, 2,600,000 men had been enlisted in the Federal armies, and while some of the records of the Confederate forces were destroyed, it has been estimated that they put more than a million men under arms.

The conclusion of the review sent back to civil life a vast host. All but a standing army of 15,000 men were disbanded.

The time had now come when President Johnson’s task assumed herculean proportions. Secession was abolished, slavery was an institution of the past, the Negroes were free, and the indestructibility of the Union and the supremacy of the national government were definitely and completely established. With the conspirators captured and on trial, public attention turned with redoubled interest to the political situation and with concentrated scrutiny to the attitude of the new Executive toward the problems that developed and multiplied daily about his head in stabilizing the government and reviving long-neglected and stagnant industries.

Before him lay the greatest responsibility and the greatest opportunity that had ever confronted any executive of the United States. From a huge disorganized fluid mass of opposed human elements, each committed to and allied to some of the varied forces that made up the national chaos, he must either bring reorganization, a harmonious welding of the mighty forces into a structure of government to endure, or must suffer retrogression, the tragedy of dissolution and national eclipse. Medusa-headed were the disrupting units, and legion the demands, needs, and appeals for attention and action.

It was a crucial period, when legal astuteness, super-statesmanship, extraordinary political acumen, expert diplomacy, unbiased vision, indomitable courage, and, above all, unswerving patriotism and Gibraltar-like strength to hold to convictions were the qualifications needed to control the rocking ship of state.

To form any just estimate of the administration of Andrew Johnson in his accidentally conferred office through such an epochal period, one must first get a concept of the man—his background of ancestry, environment, education, and former achievements.

The whole story of his life and public service reveals one of the most notable examples of self-development in our national history. Never was man more entirely captain of his own soul and master of his own destiny. Adversity surrounded him with every baffling agency in his childhood, and opportunity forgot him in his boyhood. But the fates that presided at his birth showered him liberally with pugnacity, energy, determination, and unlimited ambition which, though late in awakening, drove him unceasingly until the end of his life.

With these qualities, he builded his own career, a sturdy structure of achievement of which his posterity may be proud and to which a nation now pays a measure of tardy tribute.

Throughout his entire life, Johnson conducted a personal defense of the Constitution of the United States, which he treasured as his Bible, a much-worn copy never being absent from his pocket. However, though staunch and unswerving in his loyalty to his country, his perspective was narrowed by his own stubbornness, and his vision limited by his passion for detail.

In unwavering patriotism and firm devotion to the Union, he may be compared with Abraham Lincoln, and in the measure of his martyrdom, he falls not far behind that great emancipator.

President Lincoln lived long enough to see his gigantic struggle crowned with success, to hear the wild enthusiasm over Northern victory, and to feel the first great relief in the dawn of peace. His death, the deed of a crazed actor, enshrined him forever in American hearts.

Not even a small measure of any satisfaction or acclaim came to Andrew Johnson. He had turned his back on his native southland, upon his constituents, and had led his own state back into the Union in the face of every possible personal risk and sacrifice. With notable courage, he had taken his stand at the side of Abraham Lincoln in every crisis through the war, with a price upon his head and a curse for him in the hearts of all of the Confederacy.

When he found himself in the midst of the delegation that came to wait upon him with the news of the death of his chief and to witness his taking the oath that placed the sceptre of a great office in his hands, he plainly and emphatically avowed his purpose to carry out President Lincoln’s often-expressed policies toward the defeated Southern States. With the purest, best intentions in the world, he attempted to do this, but because he lacked the calm patience and ability to hold himself impervious to personal slander and abuse, he was denied the satisfaction that came to Abraham Lincoln before tragedy brought oblivion. Andrew Johnson found himself put through indignities and subjected to affronts such as no other President has ever been called upon to meet.

His official family withheld their support and deserted him, he was stripped officially of his prerogatives, was accused of treason and of complicity in the murder of his chief, and, finally, was haled before a Court of Impeachment, thereby providing a spectacle for the public during which he was required to defend every word and act of his public career. Attacked and ridiculed by the press, he was, at last, forced to stand before the world a leader chosen for his policies when a national exigency needed him, yet repudiated a few months later because of those same policies.

His blunders—and that he made blunders is admitted by his staunchest friends—were due to his zeal to bring to pass the measures that his point of view decreed as conducive to the best interests of his country. He met attack with counter attack, and criticism and incrimination with retort and recrimination. Herein lay the pit of his own digging—the ever-widening chasm between himself and Congress into which he was finally plunged on the most trivial and unwarranted charges. The whole matter was a product of the wild spirit of the disorganization that was then upon the land.

Through all of the abuse and criticism, Johnson, nevertheless, remained to the bitter end the same stubborn fighter, yielding not one tittle of his principles. Brusque of manner and more brusque of speech, he maintained his attitude, austere, forbidding, uncompromising, and defiant toward a hostile Congress that omitted no opportunity to belittle, discredit, and humiliate him in its final effort to depose a man it could not control for party ends. Exasperated, again and again, and led into violent retorts and unwise attacks not compatible with the dignity of his high office, he kept his faith in himself and his countrymen, in spite of all.

When he was finally vindicated, and that by but a single vote, and thus escaped being deposed, it is claimed his mask of indifference was so firmly set that he showed no elation or emotion whatever, unless it was a sense of disappointment that the long battle was over.

Johnson was born December 20, 1808, in Raleigh, N. C., in a one-room log cabin. When the boy was but four years old, the father died, leaving him and his mother to battle with poverty and obscurity. The child scrambled daily for pennies, and the best that befell him was his apprenticeship to a tailor, at the age of ten. He had no schooling whatever, not even a knowledge of the alphabet.

While he was fully engrossed in learning the technic of tailoring and becoming expert with the shears and goose he heard, through a friend, of a gentleman of the city whose favourite form of social service was that of reading aloud to labouring men in their luncheon hours. Andrew joined the group and manifested such interest that he received as a gift the book used in these readings. This imbued him with the courage to learn to read for himself.

In a moment of mischief, while still an apprentice, he and some other boys directed a rock bombardment upon what they believed to be an empty house. To his horror, he learned the next day it was occupied, and that the owner had recognized him and made a formal complaint against him. Young Johnson did not care to face a session with his employer or be taken to court; so he ran away in the night with only the clothes upon his back and the tools of his trade. His employer posted the following advertisement for the return of this future president of the United States.

Ten Dollars Reward.